Margaux Bergen - Navigating Life: Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me

S o here is why.

This is an account of our lives together, of your life and mine.

You own your life. You will shape it and assemble the pieces. Often you will be bitten on the ass by it. But its yours and it comes with the possibility of structure and form and clarityand, of course, disaster and regret and multiple failures. The abbot of Ampleforth described his schools philosophy to your inquisitive grandfather by saying, We prepare the boys for death. Rather appropriate, I thought. It will make the actual living of life sweeter.

How are you going to build a life and make a coherent narrative that is yours alone? That is the question I want you to consider. What do you want from life? Its worth asking time and again at every stage. That includes asking yourself: Who am I? Who do I want to be? How can I achieve this? A litany or a song, if you will: should I, can I, will I, ought I? Only you can ask and only you can answer.

My job is to illuminate and interpret life for you, to guide you and discipline youor nudge and nag, as you might say. I will range over the scale, from soft crooning and gentle lullabies to hoarse yelling and guttural screaming, but accompanied by much (all right, some) middle ground of straight talk and laughter. My friend Andrea, mother to two boys in Australia, describes it thus: I scream all day and I drink all night.

I want to peel apart the sticky palimpsest of contemporary motherhood and reveal to you the hidden horrors and private joys of adult life that we hide or gloss over in the amnesia of daily living. How much should I tell you? And what should I absorb into the silent order of motherhood? When should I let you take a peek at all the shit, in real time, so you and your siblings are armed as adults with examples of how to survive and thrive? I have tried to tackle my own sweaty middle-of-the-night lament: why the fuck didnt my mother tell me that, teach me that, warn me about that then?

It did not occur to me until fully ten years into it that this job of mothering could be approached in a written, directive way. All my mothering had been done verbally and on the fly, but one night when you were ten and everyone was finally asleep, I picked up my pen.

Originally I wrote this as an act of desperation, in response to a series of dramas that visited our family: addiction, illness, depression, job loss, and death. It was a rearguard action, an attempt to sort out on paper how to cope with lifes more extreme circumstances. Then, over the years of writing, as I answered that question, the less urgent but more important issue of how I could teach you to craft a meaningful life took hold. I knew that neither religion nor school would help you address this mortal questionthat it would be up to me.

So these are my observations on navigating life. Why share them with you now? Because I have learned some worthwhile things that you might benefit from. Also, the discipline of translating life into words might make me live it better, for me and for you.

I am not writing a book to groom you for or guide you to professional or academic success. My goal is rather to give you tools that might help you engage with the world and flourish. Think of this as a kind of bath-time wisdom that I have had to make for myself to fit some logic to the days events.

First, if you are to go into life with someonea child, a partner, a colleagueknow this: you cant change them. Learn this quickly, learn it well and embrace it. We all want to bend others to our will. And sometimes you will be in a position, at home or at work, where it will seem the most natural thing to doyou may even feel you have to do it. The impulse and the imperative will be to make them see things your way, do things your way, follow your way. It works for a while. And then you will see that the other is not you.

Second, cede your moral judgment to no one. Ever. This takes daily commitment. To commit to what you know to be right, or to what you want, you must know yourself. People and crowds, social circles and coworkers, even complete strangers, will bring their egos and experiences with them, their ideas and opinions, their prejudices and bigotries. Listen and filter. Enjoy, listen, and filter. But be your own judge.

This doesnt mean that you wont or shouldnt be influenced and informed, entertained and enervated, challenged and sickened by people and events. That is part of the joy of being in the world, being fully in life. But you can and should learn to be a person of substance and to bring to the world a system of values and discernment that you own and articulate.

Last, be kind. There is strength in the plainness of the word and the act. Try it daily. You have an obligation to bring to the world that which is good. It does not have to come with religion but it might. Remember going to St. Matthews on Sundays? You were required, not to believe, but simply to be present for an hour once a fortnight.

I also want you to know that these lessons need to be learned very early in life. The formation of a person, her or his soul and spirit, and subsequent responses, pathologies, and habits (knee jerk and otherwise), takes place very, very early. That is why this will be finished by the time you go to university. I am hoping that you will march into the world with a loving text that will guide you through at least some of lifes weirdness and wonder.

I am learning, as I write, how to navigate my own life, so you are reading (if I am lucky and the actuarial tables hold up) the first half of my lifes experience and observations. You will see how I have tried to build and design a life while living it, and how I have tried to do so without succumbing to greed or fear or idiocy. It is a gambleto reveal myself to you and to reveal the larger truth of what is going on under the surface of family life.

I want you to know who I am and to think about who you want to be. I will explore life from multiple points of view: mine as a woman and mother, and yours and your siblings as three teenagers wriggling on the brink of adulthood.

What does it take to keep a family together as everything around us is falling apart? What does it take to raise you and raise oneself?

I will look at what you, as you emerge into adulthood, teach me about sexuality, gossip, beauty, pain, friends, drugs, music, and social media. And, where useful, I will share with you some of my darker struggles and weirder moments, so that you can see what lurks behind the welcoming maternal facade: the fear, fury, and fatigue that motherhood and life as a woman can provoke.

Sometimes I feel I am waging a counterinsurgency for, with, and against you. I overhear you, spy on you, and love you. Sometimes I want to hit you, and often I want to run from you. I know your clothes and books, your jokes, your frenemies, and your obscure YouTube finds. I can only vaguely intuit your busy sex life.